Collective Power in the Countryside: A Conversation With Sarah Smarsh & Sarah Vogel

Three renowned authors will discuss their recent books on power and politics in rural America. In Bone of the Bone, National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh brings her graceful storytelling and incisive critique to the challenges that define our times—class division, political fissures, gender inequality, environmental crisis, media bias, and the rural-urban gulf. Sarah Vogel’s The Farmer’s Lawyer tells the unforgettable true story of a young lawyer’s impossible legal battle to stop the federal government from foreclosing on thousands of family farmers. Sonja Trom Eayrs is a farmer’s daughter, rural advocate, attorney, and author of Dodge County, Incorporated.

Presented by Farm Aid, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the CFANS Office of Undergraduate Programs. Co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota Departments of History, American Studies, and Anthropology.

Accessibility

This event will be held in Northrop’s Best Buy Theater and includes accessible seating. To make requests for disability-related accommodations, please contact Will Jones at wpjones@umn.edu two weeks prior to the event.

Related Events

• Tue, Sep 16: “Lessons in Mobilizing: From the Farmer Labor Movement to the 1980s Tractorcades to Today.” Screening of The Farmer-Labor Movement: A Minnesota Story and Tractorcade USA, with music by folk singer Larry Long. Best Buy Theater, Northrop, 4:00 pm.
• Wed, Sep 17: “Black Food Politics, History and Transformation: Reimagining Food Systems from Below.” A conversation with Dominique Hazzard, Department of African American and African Studies, and Zoe Holloman, Midwest Farmers of Color Color Collective, at the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub, 5:00 pm.
• Thu, Sep 18: Farm Aid presents a Color Me Country Takeover with Rissi Palmer, The Fine Line, 318 First Avenue North, Minneapolis, 7:00 pm.
• Fri, Sep 19: “Amplifying Inclusion: A Conversation with Rissi Palmer of Color Me Country Radio.” Ferguson Hall, Room 280, 12:00 pm.

About the Presenters

Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, and many other publications. Her first book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, was an instant New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, the winner of the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize, and a best-books-of-the-year selection by President Barack Obama.

Sarah Vogel is a North Dakota farm advocate, author, former politician, and lawyer who served as the North Dakota Commissioner of Agriculture from 1989 to 1997. As a lawyer, she specialized in agricultural law. She is the author of The Farmer’s Lawyer, about her father’s class action lawsuit Coleman v. Block.

Sonja Trom Eayrs, author of Dodge County, Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America, is a farmer’s daughter, rural advocate, and attorney. She is involved in several rural advocacy organizations, including the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, Farm Action, Land Stewardship Project, and Dodge County Concerned Citizens. Trom Eayrs also serves as the business manager for the Trom family farm in Dodge County, MN.

UMN Conversations at Northrop is a collection of lectures, panel discussions, and other conversations focused on important and timely issues presented in collaboration among numerous University of Minnesota departments and held at Northrop.